


The Tide of Space

by unremarkable_house



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s01e13 Beyond the Sea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 09:44:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6279562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unremarkable_house/pseuds/unremarkable_house
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Ep for Beyond the Sea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tide of Space

"Can I stay here for a while?" She wonders aloud as she scans the room, a membrane of tears on the cusp of her eyelids. Scully stands when she recognizes a chair adjacent to Mulder's bed. Odd how she hadn't noticed it before, hadn't yet found herself submerged into the foamy pads, counting minutes to his recovery in her customary way. It looks plush-less and worn from too many bedside vigils, but purposeful nonetheless.

The starfish of Mulder's reassuring hand on her shoulder slips reluctantly down her arm, the pads of his fingers like little suckers as he tugs, gently, at the cuff of her jacket before she moves out of reach. He props himself up a bit, arranging tubes and necklines modestly before indicating to her to sit, his nervous movements belying his comfort with this random act of intimacy. He feels suddenly agitated by Scully's sadness - his inability to ease her willful disquietude.

The gaping chasm of her father's death throws back a veil, he realizes, and science's rigid doors have closed her up once more, but he can still feel her bones on in his finger pads.

Through a self-deprecating chuckle: "Sure, uh, I was just about to turn on a movie. _Casablanca_ is on channel 34."

Scully is already anchored into the cross hatched polyester of her chair, eyes dry again, the shoulder pads of her jacket fluffed up around her ears like two little airline pillows. Her hands are folded across her lap and he notices that she is toeing her way out of her pumps, a wary reprieve.

"I figured you would be eager to get home after this whole mess." He fumbles with the remote control to the TV as he gestures with it: _this whole, emotional, confusing, mess of mind-game playing murderers_ , he truly means, and he eventually coaxes the machine to life with a snap of electricity.

She regards him aslant for a moment before letting her head fall limply to face him.

Without prelude she tells him, ”I saw my father sitting in my living room about a minute before my mother called to say he had passed. I thought he had somehow let himself in. I even talked to him. But when I looked back, he was gone.”

She doesn't say this sheepishly. Instead, she waits, lightly amused, for his reaction to the little test of her ever evolving character. He fills the silence for several beats with the technicolor bursts of changing channels before regarding her.

"Well," he picks his words carefully, clearing his throat for full attention - hers or his, he isn't quite sure. "Maybe you are ready to open yourself up to extreme possibilities." He says the last words, _extreme possibilities_ , in a ghostly diminuendo to match her own flip tone and she rewards him with a companionable smile before turning her attention back to TV, now settled on the quotidian gray and black of the classics. She is appreciative of his friendly deflection. It feels like balance.

"Or maybe I was just dreaming," she teases, although she is not quite sure which she really believes herself.

He chuckles, flashing a bit of teeth in her direction, but she feigns absorption in the program. _Yet here you are_ \- he doesn't say - _instead of at the execution_ , because it feels like an ugly a word to fit between them right now, too much a reminder of the tragedy and near-misses that surround them. She nods slowly in agreement, but declines to counter.

He watches her face privately change from amused to thoughtful and then settle on something nearest to ambivalent as she rolls out the phantoms in her neck. Amidst the cloud of hallowed memories, death sentences, and the scrutinizing bleeps of hospital equipment she remains ever a stoic.

"So I'm not eager to go back home yet,” is her honest admission, to which he thoughtfully nods his way back to the television. "And this is my favorite,” she quickly adds, making a motion to the TV, but he allows himself the indulgence to misunderstand her and believe that she means sitting here in the hospital with him.

The movie has just started and they fall into a comfortable silence. He waits for commercials to steal glances hoping to rouse a conversation, but she manages to seem preoccupied and sometimes sleepy, so he holds his tongue. Somewhere around _La Marseillaise_ , she props her stockinged feet up on his bed in a manner so casual he reaches for them before checking himself.

First, he runs his index finger over the seam of her nylons, running the ridge of her toes before gently plucking the material away, watching the topography of her foot transform into a nude lithograph before being sucked back to its contours. Turning to look, he finds her completely absorbed in his ministrations, the television forgotten and a dry smile clinging to the outermost reaches of her lips. He counts them with an overdone attention that assumes he was expecting to find less. Instead of meeting his eyes, she wiggles her toes in response and he clamps his hand around its circumference, no wider than his wrist.

Their eyes snap together briefly, mutual relief flowing through their latest connection. A circuit closed; apology accepted.

It is the first time he has ever touched her feet.

As he holds her like this, until Bogart and Bergman make their final stand, he has niggling sense that if he let her go she might float away; a helium balloon catching an updraft out of the hospital and off to caper with faceless men who are not him. Like it would be her getting on that plane instead of Ingrid and she might fly away from him. He realizes, his grip unconsciously tightening, that he couldn't bear for that to happen; he wouldn't let go. He suddenly and alarmingly sees her as a metaphor for forever. He wants to figure out what's behind her scientific defenses and let his genius mingle with hers. It feels good when to look at her.

Stirring him from his silent benedictions as if to render them embarrassingly biased, she slips her foot from his hand. Footsteps in the hall are encroaching, the rushed clip of a nurse shatters his illusion of Scully as something he must hold on to and he feels the message in his grip lost in the tide of space washed between them. She is already back in her pumps and standing with intent to leave, ignoring the pitiful plea he writes on his face, imploring her to stay. But the moment is already gone.

"This report isn't going to write itself,” she says wryly, eyeing him lying supine and straightening her suit jacket as she ambles to the edge of his bed. The nurse has immersed herself in Mulder's business, checking IV lines, hookups, and other vital signs they both know Scully is capable of monitoring.

She invokes her farewell by surreptitiously squeezing the mound of his foot beneath the blankets, just briefly, before she exits stage left. Their silent call and response. And she doesn't even stay for the end of the movie, so Mulder says some for her as she leaves.

“Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow. But soon, and for the rest of your life.”

**Author's Note:**

> Applied loosely to Leiascully's writing challenge "Distance". 
> 
> It's probably clear that I have never seen Casablanca, although I probably should because in my head canon it is always playing on channel 34 when Mulder and Scully watch TV. Kind of a 'Knicks tee shirt' kind of thing.


End file.
